One of the most popular uses we’ve seen for Wufoo has been as a lead generation form on a business website, like setting up a Contact Us form or a Mailing List sign up form to allow users and potential customers the ability to indicate that they’d like to receive more information about your product or service.

It’s a great way for customers to show that they have some interest in your business and it’s a great way for Wufoo users to automate the process instead of handling everything manually. Remember, Wufoo is here to make your life easier. Today, I’m going to outline some steps you should take to make your lead gen forms even better and more effective.

### 1. Only Ask For Pertinent Info On Your Lead Gen Form

This is one of those rules that everyone knows about but in practice, very few people follow. Everyone is super busy and if a potential customer sees a form that has a ton of fields to fill out, chances are they aren’t going to fill it out.

So the first order of business is to take a step back and figure out what information you really need your potential customer to fill out for you to do your job (e.g. follow up with them). And if you really, **really**, think about it, the list is pretty short. And I bet it looks something like this:

> 1. Name (First and Last since that helps make your form look professional).
> 2. Email Address (so, you know, you can email them).

And that’s it. Yes really. Okay, so maybe your company is different and you need other information like a phone number, how much of your product the person is interested in, etc. But I’d caution you to really think through each and every additional field you add to your form since it’s been shown that each additional field on your form **decreases** your conversion rate. And since we’re talking about a lead gen form here, you want as many people as possible to fill out your form. So, *keep it simple and keep it pertinent*.

### 2. Send Your Potential Customer A Confirmation Email

The next thing you’ll want to do is to send your potential customer a confirmation email letting them know that you received their inquiry and that you’ll be reaching out in person shortly. The main reason to send a confirmation email is to make sure that your customer feels like they received a **quick** response from you and that you’re on top of things. The last thing you want your customer to feel is that you’re slow to respond to their needs. And the best thing about using Wufoo to send a confirmation email is that it’s done automatically for you, so its another thing you don’t need to worry about.

You can find out how to setup a confirmation email in our Help Documentation, as well as some other tips on how to customize your confirmation email based on rules and a quick overview of emails Wufoo sends.

### 3. Integrate Your Form With MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Or Another Email Service

Finally, the last thing you want to make sure you do is integrate your lead gen form with MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, or some other email list service. By directly integrating with MailChimp or Campaign Monitor or using a service like Zapier to integrate with your email list service of choice, you’re really doing two things here.

**First**, instead of manually aggregating all of your potential leads via email or a spreadsheet, you’re automatically collecting it in these services which makes it infinity easier to manage at a later date. **Second**, you’re building a mailing list of users who indicated they were interested in your product and services so whenever you decide to expand your product offering or service, you have a built in distribution list to notify and let them know about your new developments. You don’t need to build the list from scratch each time and manage all of the unsubscribe functionality for you. Just another thing you don’t have to worry about and another way to automate your business using Wufoo.

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These small tweaks to your lead gen forms all add up to a form that a) is easier to complete, increasing conversions, b) shows your customers that you’re responsive and on the ball, and c) helps you build up a mailing list of interested customers to help your business grow. And best of all, it cuts down on manual work since Wufoo does all the heavy lifting to automate the work for you.